Especially if you didn’t have a lot of spare time. With an active community you can just dip into discussions when you have the time. With a community you’re trying to establish yourself you absolutely have to provide a steady stream of content until it (hopefully) takes off.

We know that people have different chronotypes. We even know that most people of working age aren’t really morning people. Unfortunately, our business world assumes a standard circadian rhythm and is structured around getting up early because people needed to use every bit of daylight way back when. So that sucks, especially if you’re an evening or even night person.

I’d argue that unfun design elements can be useful in games if used with care and purpose. For instance, “suddenly all of the characters you’re attached to are dead” is not exactly fun but one of the Fire Emblem games used it to great dramatic effect at the midway point.

Of course the line between an event or mechanic that players love to hate and one they just hate is thin.

Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.

These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you’re no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don’t want to implement autodetection.)

Nvidia’s Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD’s; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.

Also, Nvidia’s drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There’s typically just an error code for “the driver has crashed”, no matter what reason it crashed for.

Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn’t contain error information beyond “something bad happened” and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from “the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards” over “some BIOS setting might need to be changed” and “sometimes the card doesn’t like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard” to “it’s a manufacturing defect”.

Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can’t fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It’s slower but I like the driver better.

Speak for yourself. I’m going to migrate all of my 22-bit RSA keys to a longer key length. And not 24 bits, either, given that they’re probably working on a bigger quantum computer already. I gotta go so long that no computer can ever crack it.

64-bit RSA will surely be secure for the foreseeable future, cost be damned.

I also only used v2 but it’s the extra stuff in it that slightly annoys me. Like how turbo mode (brighter than the usual maximum but usually time-limited to avoid overheating) is only available when the full UI is unlocked. Or how there’s a stepped ramp mode that I have to remember to disable whenever I swap out the battery. Or how I can accidentally enter one of the more exotic modes of for some reason I press the button too often.

Anduril is way overengineered. I like this UI that some of my lights have:

While off:

• One push: Turn on at the last used brightness.
• Two pushes: Turn on at maximum brightness.
• Three pushes: That strobe mode that you don’t need but seems to be obligatory.
• Hold: Turn on at the lowest brightness (or moonlight mode if the light has one).

While on:

• One push to turn off.
• Two pushes to toggle between maximum brightness and the last used “regular” brightness.
• Three: That strobe mode that someone has to have some use for.
• Hold: Alternately increase or decrease the brightness.

That’s pretty easy to learn and gives you all the functions you’d reasonably need (plus that strobe) without a lot of clutter.

We used to have one: “Solang das deutsche Reich besteht wird jede Schraube rechts gedreht.” (“As long as the German Empire persists every screw is turned right.”)

Given that the German Empire failed spectacularly, this sentence isn’t very popular anymore.

I fix that problem by forgetting to turn off Do Not Disturb mode. Also works wonders for blocking all of the calls you do want to take.

They did PR campaigns against Linux and OpenOffice for quite some time – until cloud computing took off and it turned out they could earn more money by supporting Linux than by fighting it.

In fact, Microsoft weren’t happy about FOSS in general. I can still remember when they tried to make “shared source” a thing: They made their own ersatz OSI with its own set of licenses, some of which didn’t grant proper reuse rights – like only allowing you to use the source code to write Windows applications.

True, although that has happened with F/OSS as well (like with xz or the couple times people put Bitcoin miners into npm packages). In either case it’s a lot less likely than the software simply ceasing to be supported, becoming gradually incompatible with newer systems, and rotting away.

Except, of course, that I can pick up the decade-old corpse of an open source project and try to make it work on modern systems, despite how painful it is to try to get a JavaFX application written for Java 7 and an ancient version of Gradle to even compile with a recent JDK. (And then finally give up and just run the last Windows release with its bundled JRE in Wine. But in theory I could’ve made it work!)

Note that this specifically talks about proprietary platforms. Locally-run proprietary freeware has entirely different potential issues, mostly centered around the developer stopping to maintain it. Locally-run F/OSS has similar issues, actually, but lessened by the fact that someone might later pick up the project and continue it.

Admittedly, platforms are very common these days because the web is an easily accessible cross-platform GUI toolkit SaaS is more easily monetized.

And this is why stuff should be defined in terms of day’s earnings to provide scaling. If an ultra-rich person gets jailed and has to post 20 billion dollars in bail, they can’t treat jail as a minor inconvenience.

You forgot the degaussing sound for those screens that had that feature. Like turning them on but louder.

*KLONK*

And I wouldn’t know where to start using it. My problems are often of the “integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs” variety. LLMs can’t do shit about that; they weren’t trained for it.

They’re nice for basic rote work but that’s often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.

Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.

“Well, excuuuuuse me, princess!”

gets shot twice, just to make sure

It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it’s not really a surprise.